Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Science is proving what pet
owners have long believed: Dogs understand what we're feeling. Specifically,
dogs can recognize the difference between a happy and an angry human face, a
study published Thursday in Current Biology suggests.

It's the first research to
show definitively that dogs are sensitive to our facial expressions, says
coauthor Ludwig Huber, head of comparative cognition at Messerli Research
Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.

In the Austrian study, 20
pet dogs of various breeds and sizes were taught to play a computer game
through a series of exercises. In the first, the dogs were shown two touch
screens, one with a circle and one with a square. Through trial and error, they
learned that a treat would appear if they chose the right geometrical figure.

Eleven of the 20 dogs were
able to catch on to rules of the game and make it to the next phase, where they
were shown photos of faces. Half the dogs were rewarded for picking a happy
expression and half for choosing an angry expression. The interesting catch:
the dogs were shown only the upper half or the lower half of a face.

It was easier to teach the
dogs to choose a happy expression than an angry one, suggesting the dogs do
indeed understand the meaning behind the expression, Huber says.

As a test, the dogs were
then were presented with:

the same half of the faces
they saw during the training, but from different people
the other half of the faces used in training
the other half of new faces
the left half of the faces used in training
In the vast majority of cases the dogs chose the right answer 70 to 100 percent
of the time.

Dogs who had been trained
to recognize an expression of anger or happiness on the upper part of a face
could identify the same expression when shown only the lower part, and vice
versa, Huber says, adding “the only possible explanation is that they recall
from memory of everyday life how a whole human face looks when happy or angry.”

Dog owners know their pets
not only recognize emotions but also feel empathy.

Delilah, a 3-year-old
Chihuahua, always seems to know when her owner Eva Shure is having a bad day.

Delilah knows when her owner is having a bad day.
Making eye contact and cocking her head to the right, the little dog will stare
at Shure's face as if trying to assess her feelings. “It’s weird, I can see her
thinking and processing,” says Shure, a 35-year-old New York City business
owner. “I’ll say, yeah, it’s not a great day and she’ll come up and sit next to
me.”

Beverly Levreault, 57, says
her 6-year-old Australian Cattle Dog mix is always tuned in to her moods. “If
I’m not feeling well, like when I have the flu, Lacey is definitely lower key
and will not leave my side, ” says Levreault, a graphic designer from
Williamstown, New York. “If I take her for a walk, she’s not as rambunctious as
she usually is.”

Lynette Whiteman says she’s
not sure that her 5-year-old Yorkie-Maltese cross is using facial expressions
to gauge how she feels. “But she definitely reads my emotions,” says the
58-year-old from Toms River, New Jersey. “I run a therapy dog program and the
dogs are just amazing. They go into a room and immediately pick out the person
who needs help.”

Behavioral experts say the
new findings, while important, wouldn’t surprise anyone with an intimate
knowledge of dogs.

Coco and Lynettte
"This new work continues to build the case for just how sensitive dogs are
to our subtle behaviors,” says Dr. Brian Hare, chief scientific officer at
Dognition and an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke
University. “This is the strongest evidence yet that dogs are even reading our
facial expressions.”

That sensitivity may be the
result of generations of selective breeding for a true partner, says Dr. Carlo
Siracusa, director of the behavior service at the University of Pennsylvania
School of Veterinary Medicine. “We have selected animals that are able to perceive
our emotions and communicate with us at a level that no other animal can,”
Siracusa says.

Dogs may not talk, but they
are very good communicators, says Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a professor in the
department of clinical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine
at Tufts University and director of the animal behavior clinic at Cummings.

“Just as we are masters of
the spoken word, dogs are experts at reading body language,” Dodman says.

“It’s almost impossible to
hide your feelings from a dog.”

Turns out, reading facial
expressions isn’t the only thing dogs have in common with us.

They can be bitten by the
computer gaming bug. “They can really become freaks for it,” Huber says with a
chuckle. “They don’t want to stop playing. It’s incredible. They’ll play till
they are exhausted and fall asleep.”